(Preached on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2009)
“…to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” -Luke 2:11-12
Did we bring our Christmas hopes along to church this evening – hoping for that special Christmas present? Hoping we won’t have to continue that argument that was started over breakfast this morning? Hoping I won’t be long winded so you can get to dinner and Noche Buena feasting? I brought some hopes with me today, too. It’s one thing to have hope when we’re well fed, financially secure, on good terms with the family, have a blackberry full of friends, and are respected by our colleagues. It’s quite another thing to have hope when prosperity seems to be in serious question and distress is the order of the day. Hope is a little more difficult this year. Where is hope in chronic hunger, financial insecurity, years of family unrest, and an endless wait for the acclaim we think we deserve? Whence comes hope when the fiancé turns up pregnant, there’s no hope of being excused from the emperor’s census, and business will be lost because of closing down the carpentry shop? Where does hope come from when everything seems hopeless? Are we fooling ourselves by hoping that someday things will be different – that they may even be, dare we hope, better?
With all these hopes, we come to church on Christmas Eve and are greeted by the strangest of all stories. It is a story that is amazing, awesome, awe-inspiring, overwhelming, unexpected (even though we have heard it for years and could recite it by memory), and just plain odd. It is so strange that when we think about Christmas, suddenly the camera goes out of focus and everything gets a bit blurred. We’ve gilded the image and scrubbed it clean to such an extent that we often miss the marvel of it. Too often, we’ve traded fuzzy feeling for jaw-dropping awe. In our hands Christmas becomes a dream, an escape. But this strange story from the Bible is extreme reality.
It doesn’t get much more real than the birth of a baby. Those of us privileged enough to have been present when a new life comes into this world know all too well it is an extremely messy affair, even in our sanitized, disinfected hospitals. Throw all that yelling and screaming, grunting and pushing, fluid and blood and afterbirth into a stable and the OCD among us would run screaming for the hills and even the “messies” among us would reach for the hand sanitizer! Stables are smelly, messy places, even the cleanest of them. My new route for my morning walk takes me past a property on Old Cutler Road with a small horse paddock and barn. No matter which way the wind blows I cannot miss its presence. The odor reminds me of visiting the Elephant House at the zoo in St. Louis when I was a child. You would be knocked over by the odor upon entering.
I mention all this not because I want to ruin our Christmas Eve, but because this is all part of what actually makes this odd story Good News! This is actually evidence for hope! This cow shed, this manger, is an intersection between heaven and earth. This is where our hopes for God meet God’s hopes for us. This manger is where heaven and earth embrace!
You can tell a great deal about someone by whom that person visits. When Gandhi went to England, he visited first the Manchester cotton mill workers, most of whom were unemployed. Many of these workers suffered terribly because of the textile boycott that Gandhi led in India. Gandhi had urged his followers not to wear clothes made in England to protest against English imperialism. Therefore, among the first people that Gandhi visited in England was not the Prime Minister or Parliament, but were the unemployed textile workers. Gandhi gave them his sympathy, he apologized for the harm that his movement had caused them, but he tried to explain to them the basis of his movement and his rationale. All of this was most revealing for who Gandhi was and the work in which he was engaged.
When God took on human flesh, God did not come to those who were high and mighty. God was not born in the throne room of a palace, not to the high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets of a wealthy mansion, not even to the simple surroundings of a publicly funded community hospital. No God came in the most down and dirty environment imaginable – a cow shed, a horse barn. God came to the meek and lowly. God did not come to those who were in charge of things, but to those who were oppressed by those who were in charge of things. Now what does that tell you about God?
The Christmas story tells us that God has not given up on us, on our world, and will do whatever it takes to bring about wholeness, well-being, and peace on earth. There is reason to hope. This odd story suggests that the word “God” has been unceremoniously expanded to include some familiar and common realities. This word “God” now includes a homeless child born in questionable circumstances in a town chosen by the decree of a faceless bureaucracy. This word “God” not includes a single person lost in the statistics that are part of a census; it includes the wailing of an infant; it includes a child growing into a teenager; it includes a person’s work and dreams; it includes a hideous death. In short, Christmas tells us that the word “God” has been expanded so that it now includes a human life.
Thank God for this odd little story. Because of it, tonight we celebrate the hallowing of our human flesh. Tonight our potential strengths are uncovered and our weaknesses overcome. Tonight our self-respect is recreated by that common yet unique baby. Tonight our faith is renewed as the unexpected God does this unexpected thing by which the whole world is in a profound sense reborn through one more human baby. With that birth, the world is never the same again; never the same valley of broken hopes; never the same stony field of ultimate loneliness. Tonight we once more celebrate that True-love has broken loose on planet earth. The very soul of God wears our flesh and shares our laughter, bears our smell and shares our toil, dares our dreams and shares our frustration.
With the reliance of Divine grace, with the light which cannot be put out, with the joy which no one can take from us, God comes among us gasping a first human breath and making a little crying protest at the apparent coldness of existence. It is all so wonder-fully odd yet so wonder-fully right for this kind of world in which we dwell. That is why we have gathered this even in anticipation; that the unexpected God may meet us again in the stable-like stuff of our experience; that we might once again know the reality of heaven and earth embracing. That is the source of our true hope for “peace on earth, good will to all” at Christmas, and all the year to come.